


How Far We've Come

by NotGarfield



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, I didn't plan this, Pillow Talk, but the angst is mostly in flashbacks, or revise it, we're pretending it's fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 09:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21492232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotGarfield/pseuds/NotGarfield
Summary: Nathalie and Gabriel reflect back on how they got to where they are now.
Relationships: Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth/Nathalie Sancoeur
Comments: 8
Kudos: 50





	How Far We've Come

Nathalie knew only one person with the audacity to knock on her apartment door at a quarter past midnight, and her stomach twisted with worry as she got up from the couch. A glance through the peephole confirmed her suspicions. When she opened the door, Gabriel Agreste stepped inside without so much as a hello, wearing a grin that made her shiver. Maybe it was just the way the light hit him from the single lamp she had on, but though his features were the ones she knew, something looked terribly wrong with his face.

He held out an open hand, and Nathalie’s eyes widened at the sight of a black ring and a pair of spotted red earrings. “Oh.”

“I’ve won,” Gabriel said softly, still wearing that unsettling grin. “I can bring Emilie back.”

Nathalie didn’t know what to say. It had happened so fast, and so unexpectedly; had she ever really expected him to succeed? But here he was.

“But there’s a cost.” Gabriel took a step closer and grabbed Nathalie’s wrist with his free hand, closing his fist around the jewels. “An exchange, a life for a life.” All Nathalie could see was his eyes. She froze as the weight of what he was implying set in.

“Nathalie, you’ve supported me this whole way. I couldn’t have done it without you...You want me to have her back, don’t you? You want me to be happy again?”

Her ears rang as adrenaline and formless emotion poured through her body. He was really saying...He was really ready to throw her life away, just like that. 

*****

Nathalie went quiet, and Gabriel tightened his arms around her, pulling her closer into his chest. “ _ Ma cherie _ , I...” he breathed, his voice shaking. “I would never. Even back then, I couldn’t have  _ dreamed _ of asking such a thing of you. You know that, don’t you?”

“I do now,” she answered. “At the time...Anyway, that wasn’t what frightened me most.”

*****

His gaze, uncanny, imploring, was the only thing that kept her standing. She wanted to faint. Wanted to black out and wake up and find him gone.

That was the only way out. She could have shoved him away, told him to get out of her apartment, called the police and told them everything, but she knew that she wouldn’t. She had all the proof she needed to ruin his life and have him locked up forever, and he knew it. But she knew he also knew that he still held all the power over her.

She nodded. Her voice came out as a rasping whisper. “Yes. Yes, I will” -

And then a vortex of glowing pink rushed through the window, whirled around Gabriel and vanished as quickly as it had come. Nathalie was alone in her apartment. There were no miraculous. The door, which Gabriel had left open behind him, was closed again. Whatever had just happened...had it not been real?

Nathalie stood still, staring into nothing, tears pressing against the backs of her eyes but not quite spilling over, until she noticed a distant church bell chiming one. Then she shook herself, and sat down on the couch, and started to cry.

*****

She had been calm while telling the story, but the memory of that next hour - the running nose and parched throat, and the spasms halfway between sobs and hiccups that had eventually seized her so hard she struggled to breathe, and the way the tears kept coming until they were dripping from her chin and running down her neck - was still so vivid that fresh tears started to prickle at her eyes as she finished. Gabriel noticed and started to rub circles into her back.

“That’s what frightened me so much,” she said once she was confident she could do so steadily. “The idea that I couldn’t have told you no, even to something like that. I lost a lot of sleep over that. I’ve always valued my independence, so realizing how much of it I had lost...”

Gabriel let out a breath. Nathalie couldn’t see his face in the darkness of their bedroom, but she could tell he was thinking. 

“You told me no the first time I asked you to marry me, remember?”

Nathalie smiled. “Of course I remember. It was a very unconventional proposal, after all.”

*****

They stared together into the darkness at the other end of the deserted park, where Ladybug and Chat Noir -  _ Adrien _ \- had disappeared. After a time Gabriel made a choked noise and shifted on the bench so that he was angled away from Nathalie. She wrapped her arms around his torso and rested her cheek against the back of his shoulder, and didn’t speak.

“I wouldn’t have done any of it if I had known,” he said at last, his voice rough. Nathalie could feel the vibrations in his chest. “This was supposed to be for him as much as for me.”

“I know.” Nathalie felt guilt squeezing at her as well, recalling the time that Mayura had struck Chat and slammed him to the ground, and worse, the time she had played on his most painful and vulnerable emotions to get what she wanted from him. She should have been thinking all along that someone must have cared for the boy under the mask the way she cared for Adrien.

“What now?” Gabriel asked. She knew that he was only asking out of restlessness and helplessness; he knew the answer, but she offered it anyway.

“We do as they said - we keep our heads down and wait for them to decide what happens to us.”

He tensed in her arms, and she held him tighter. Headlights from a passing car flashed over them and disappeared again. Something that sounded like drunken singing reached their ears from a distance. 

“Nathalie?”

“Yes?”

“Marry me.”

She stiffened and a breathless, humorless chuckle of surprise escaped her. “What?”

“Marry me.”

“Gabriel, this…hardly seems like the time.” 

Her arms loosened as he turned to face her. She hoped it was too dark for him to see her hot face, hoped he couldn’t hear her heart speeding. “Please,” he said, with a vulnerability in his voice that she rarely heard. “I should have realized a long time ago how much you mean to me. I’ve lost Emilie, and God only knows Adrien won’t want to see me again now...I can’t lose another person I love. I can’t live without you, Nathalie.”

A confession of feelings from the man she had loved for years was the last thing Nathalie’s already shot nerves needed just then. She took a deep breath, trying to collect herself to say what she knew she should. “I can’t say yes. Not right now.” And in answer to the question he didn’t have a chance to speak: “I can’t live without you either, and that’s why I can’t marry you. Neither of us is ready. You need to grieve first, properly. And I need…” Her voice trailed off. She knew what she needed, but not how to put it into words. “This isn’t a no forever, Gabriel, just for now. I do love you.”

Her hand found his, and their fingers interlaced. “Come on,” she said. “Shivering in a park at two in the morning isn’t going to make any of this better. Let’s go home.”

*****

“You’ve always been the wise one between us,  _ ma cherie _ ,” Gabriel said. “It was the right choice.”

“I know.”

Gabriel’s hand, which had continued to rub her back, went still. “Sometimes,” he said, and an edge crept into his voice, “I wonder if it would have been better for you to tell me no for good.”

Nathalie frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I asked you what Sandboy showed you because today, I asked Adrien the same thing.” He swallowed. “He said he saw bars. His nightmare was being trapped even more than he already was. It seems that the misfortune of having me in your lives damaged  _ both  _ of you.”

Nathalie wrapped her arms around her husband and rested her head on his chest. “Don’t say things like that, Gabriel,” she said, her voice muffled by his pajamas. “It’s not like I wouldn’t have had problems if I hadn’t met you.”

“I still wish I was able to do better by you. This isn’t the happy ending you deserve.” He didn’t elaborate, but she could guess at a few of the things he meant by “this:” the ankle monitor that he had never gotten used to, for all that it was a generous concession compared to the punishment he could have had; the fact that they were talking instead of sleeping because she’d had another nightmare about Mayura and startled them both awake; the tension that still crept into their dinners with Adrien and Marinette despite all parties’ best efforts. She didn’t need her long-gone empathetic power to sense his feeling of inadequacy, and she hated it.

She pressed a long kiss to his lips. “Gabriel, this is the happiest ending I could hope for.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm having terrible writer's block on "The Trouble With Kwaamis," so have this one-shot that came to me in the shower this morning instead.


End file.
